The present invention relates to a device and a method for finding information elements in one or more objects, the information elements being storable in digital form in a storage device and the objects being displayable on a display device via a graphical user interface.
When working with today's complex mechanical engineering products, the user is often confronted with unsolvable problems concerning the operation and the finding of parts to be service or possibly replaced. Each manufacturer uses different names for certain parts of their machines and different ways of structuring the operating and maintenance instructions pertaining to the machines. Therefore, to be able to find one's way around the operating and maintenance instructions, the user must often be acquainted with the terminology of the terms used for the individual parts of his/her machine. The machines in question include, for example, printing presses, machine tools, but also automobiles, trucks, traveling cranes, etc.
To make it easier for the operator or user to find specific parts to be serviced or replaced or in order to facilitate the operation of his/her machine, so-called online operating and maintenance instructions are increasingly integrated into the respective machine, besides the conventional, mostly very comprehensive and thick manuals for operation and maintenance. The user or operator can view these instructions, for example, on a display screen which is present on or integrated into the machine anyway. In this context, there are solutions in which the conventional paper manual is converted one-to-one to a PDF or HTML document in software. These are classical tree structures with tables of content, analogous to paper publications. However, the advantages of modern software-aided navigation and search methods are not used in this manner.
Moreover, a structure containing so-called “hyperlinks” is known from the field of the Internet, i.e., references are made from marked objects, whether they are words or drawings, to further information sources; the user navigating from hyperlink to hyperlink. However, this is very unstructured and highly time-consuming, because the user finds himself/herself led astray very quickly.